Tim Green: Exact Revenge

I smiled at her as she opened the door and composed a smile of her own. I looked into her blue eyes. Her teeth shone white. The sheen of her hair made me want to touch it. Beauty, with a distinct undercurrent of sadness.

We kissed quickly and I slipped my fingers through that hair, taking it in both hands and kissing it like a vestment before turning the key to my new car. They had impounded my Supra, and in order to forget about it I treated myself to a red RX-7. Instead of taking my usual right at the end of the street, I went left.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“A surprise.”

We listened to the news on NPR. I switched it to music when the local announcer started talking about the trial. I wanted to talk, but I had to choose my words carefully. One of the things we had come to argue about most was the way I talked so freely about the future, as if it were set. For whatever reason, Lexis couldn’t stand to do that. So we talked about current events or things that had nothing to do with either of us. Or the past.

That’s why I knew she’d like my surprise. There wasn’t much about either of our pasts that we hadn’t discussed over the last nine months. But there was this place that we went to when I was a kid. It was my dad’s uncle’s place. The brother of the man I was named after, Raymond Edinger. They called it the Blue Hole. I had forgotten about it, to be honest.

I turned south off Route 20 and drove down into Otisco Valley. I hadn’t been to the place in years and wasn’t even sure who owned it anymore. I didn’t want to tell Lexis about it in case we couldn’t get in. But as I turned off the road and drove down through the colonnade of massive spruce, I was heartened by the shaggy edges of the gravel drive. The woods opened up and the old white house came into view. It was empty, and one black shutter hung at an angle, distorting the face of what I had remembered as a fussy, well-kept colonial.

“Do you know these people?” Lexis asked.

“Old relatives,” I said, swinging the wheel and driving down past the house and onto an overgrown grass trail.

Brown grass and dead weeds swished beneath us and an occasional branch thumped the undercarriage. We kept going down, and as the rocks and mud rattled in the wheel wells, I knew I’d have to keep my foot on the gas to get us out.

I kept going, though, down to the bend, where I stopped and got out at the head of a footpath. The sun was bright on the naked trees that climbed the far side of the steep ravine. The crashing water nearly drowned out all other sounds.

“What is it?” Lexis asked.

“The Blue Hole,” I said. “You gotta see it.”

She took my hand and I led her, slipping and catching ourselves on the midriffs of thin saplings, down the path and into the ravine. We pushed through a crowded stand of hemlock, then came out suddenly on a shale ledge that jutted out over the swirling pool of water below the falls. The brunt of the water shot through a narrow groove at the falls’ head before plummeting another twelve feet to a whirlpool that had the reputation of being bottomless.

No less than three people had died in that hole during my lifetime and I was barely eight years old before my great-uncle closed it to the curious public. Still, the Blue Hole’s reputation tempted trespassers of all kinds, and the last person to disappear into its depths was a high school kid who had failed his final exam in math.

When the stream was high, as it was now, curtains of water spilled off either side of the shoot, hissing across the face of the precipitous shale that was bronzed with mossy slime. The noise reverberated off the steep walls and it sounded like a giant fist pounding the earth.

“My God,” Lexis said.

I gripped her hand, lacing my fingers in between hers. Already I could feel the constriction in my chest and the bolts of electric thrill surging up from my core to the spot behind my ears.

“We used to jump from here,” I said, above the din.

Lexis wiped a strand of hair from her face and wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

“What?”

I began stripping off my shirt and untying my shoes.

“Raymond?” she said. “What the hell?”

For nine months I had existed in a place between heaven and hell, neither alive nor dead, neither happy nor sad.

“Goddamn,” I said, breathing deep the smell of mud and water and broken rock, the heady sound of pounding water filling my brain. “It’s like we were here like this before.”

I handed her my shoes with the socks stuffed inside them. I stripped off my pants and even my boxers, rolling them up into my shirt, wrapping them in my belt, and handing them to Lexis.

“That water’s got to be freezing,” she said, her eyes wide, but taking the clothes and clutching them tight to her chest. “Are you crazy?”

I took her hand and gripped it again, pointing to the shale path that did several switchbacks through the steep grass before it ended at the bedrock below at the foot of another pool that belonged to a second and smaller falls.

“I’ve done it a thousand times,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

“Raymond, you’re out of your fucking mind,” she said, yanking me back toward her.

I put my arm around her waist and held her tight to my naked body, kissing her hard, letting my blood rise even higher. Then I pulled away.

“I love you,” I said, letting go of her hand.

I turned and leapt from the ledge. It was the same ravine. The same crashing water. The same trees that hung on by their bare roots, fighting to stay upright. The same narrow pool that looked so ridiculously small from up here. It was all familiar to me. A feat I had performed countless times. So why was I scared so bad that my heart froze and my adolescent war cry got jammed up in my throat?

The milky green water came up fast and it hit me hard enough to jar my breath away. Then everything was cold and black and I was fighting helplessly against the swirl with all my might. My arms were flipped this way and that, out of control, grazing the rough rock walls. My feet kicked insanely and I realized I didn’t even know if I was fighting my way up or down. My eyes were wide and full of water. The blackness turned green, then white with swirling bubbles, and just before my lungs burst, I shot clear of the surface, sucking in air and flailing like a drowning cat.

The water spun me some more, and I grabbed desperately for the slick ledge on the far side of the pool away from the sheer rock. Finally, I pulled myself up, where I rested, shivering on my hands and knees, until that war whoop finally busted loose.

I heard Lexis’s voice calling my name, small between the great rocky walls. It echoed up from the hissing below. It pierced the thundering roar of the water, and I stood to wave my arms at her. She held out my clothes, and beckoned for me to come down.

That night, after we were tangled together beneath the warm blankets in my bed, she asked me what the hell I did it for.

I wanted to give her a reason that was bigger than the one I really had, but the best I could come up with was that I had forgotten what it felt like to control my own destiny.

“If you could control it,” she said, “it wouldn’t be your destiny.”

We slept like spoons with her head on one of my arms and my other wrapped around her firm belly. I kept waking up and whispering the promise to her that everything was going to be all right. I told her that she was going to be my wife and that I’d take care of her until the end of time.

The next day we drove to the courthouse through a chill rain. By four-thirty, the jury convicted me of murder. My body went numb. My mind whirled. The bailiffs snapped handcuffs on my wrists and started to lead me away. As I neared the door, I came to my senses and I looked for Lexis. Her eyes were glassy. Her mouth hung open. She slowly raised her fingers to me and then Frank was there with that slab of a hand on her shoulder, his head bowed.